People can learn peace

The challenges and possibilities of peace education

by Jan Durk Tuinier and Geu Visser

Peace education means that you can learn peace. Peace does not appear out of the blue but is it is the people who make peace. People of all times, anywhere have made war and knocked each other’s brains out. That is only one side of the coin. People of all times, anywhere have also made peace with each other. People have a lot of experience of making peace. That sounds strange especially when you consider that there are more than thirty great wars and armed conflicts in the world. And dozens of smaller violent confrontations at that.

The best thing to do is to consider peace as something to do. You can talk about it endlessly and try to catch it in definitions but in the end you just have to do it in the group of children where you teach. You want to provide a climate where the children can come out well, where they can develop themselves and where they learn to live together with each other.

The meaning of peace education

Children and young people are growing up in a society where peace and unrest are the order of the day. Everyday they are faced with their portion of violence. In films, computer games, history books, television news and -not to forget- the bullying in the streets and in the group. The negative aspects are highlighted. It is the task of the educators and also of the school to lead children into our world. You have to learn a lot to be able to. You have to be able to read and arithmetic and how you can go from A to B. But that will not do. You also have to learn to listen to others, to cooperate, to take care of each other and of yourself. To learn what peace is about. To learn how you can deal with conflicts and what prejudices are and how you can learn to appreciate people who, at first sight, seem to be strange.

Beyond the curriculum

Yes, that’s true. Peace education cannot be categorized into school subjects. It is a field of forming and therefore it goes beyond the curriculum. That has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that it contains innumerous themes and that you loose track. But the advantage is that you can work by theme. You can concentrate themes like peace on conflicts, on prejudices, on the multicultural society, on violence in everyday life, the theme of rich and poor and also on the commemoration of World War II. This means that you always have to look in advance what you want to aim for with the children.

Social problems.

Social problems are always the case in education. The basic principle of people’s rights is the violation and protection of people. Developmental Education aims at our relation to people from the South the so-called Third World. Environmental Education aims at the destruction of the environment on earth. Peace Education starts from the conflicts between people in all kinds of fields.

Negative approach

It is certainly not the intention to burden children with problems. Many adults are touched by children when they offer signatures to the minister to end the pollution of oceans. You have to watch out with that, since it is primarily the responsibility of adults. You can’t bring children to peace by merely showing them the consequences of war and violence. That won’t do. Peace education must be put on with positive goals and of course the children must be approached according to their level of development.

Interactive exhibitions

In the past years Peace Education Projects has made several exhibitions for children and young people. These are not exhibitions in the traditional sense with some texts and pictures. They are interactive. You have to do and discover all kinds of things by yourself. There are no guides like in a museum. You are going ahead with a peer and write down several things in a notebook along the way. These notes will be discussed in school later on. The starting-point for these exhibitions, that are traveling all over Europe and Russia, is that we do not teach the children what they should think, but that they think. That is our philosophy for peace education. You are not teaching the children any opinions. You rather teach them to form their own opinions. To achieve that you need information and confrontation. Children are not empty containers in which you can put any kind of standards and values. Children have a right of respect en are full participants in these exhibitions. We notice that it works. We also perceived this in Northern-Ireland where organizations we co-operated with, developed educational software from our exhibitions, together with both catholic and protestant teachers. This project had an enormous impact to both the climate in classrooms and the school curriculum in the case of reconciliation programs.

Unmask prejudices

At the exhibition they discover, for instance, what the difference is between a fact and an opinion. They find out what a prejudice is. That all people have prejudices. That we aren’t born with it but that we have learned them, so that it is not too bad to have prejudices, but that you have to be careful with them. Prejudices can be awkward and very annoying for other people. Also when people are biased towards you because you are young, old, fat or thin, because the color of your skin is black, white or brown, or because your father is a drinker. We try to create a teaching climate in which it is nice to learn and that is based on the positive capabilities in people and children.. At the end of the prejudices working method the children arrive at two exits. On exit is for children without any prejudices and the other for children with prejudices. A whole lot of children understand. They take the exit for children with prejudices. Some of them , and a lot of adults, first take the other exit. It is not nice having prejudices. However, this exit is closed. There is a sign with the text: “Everyone has prejudices, everyone can be mistaken”.

Respect for children

There is a direct link between what you aim for in education and the way in which you want to achieve that. If you want for the children to learn to think independently, and to develop a moral judgment of their own, then simply saying what is wrong or right will not do. Anyone will sense that. However, in practice this method of conveying messages is still very common in education at home and in school.

This is based on the idea that children are brought up in a separate ‘Youthland’ and that it is the very task of educators to communicate one-sided information and standards and values. Youthland can no longer exist. Children do not live in a world of their own anymore, separate from adults. They live together and are confronted with the same kind of problems. The mass media such as television and the Internet have taken away this separation radically. After all, these media make no distinction between age and level of development. This implies that our relationship with children has changed considerably. Education is more of a mutual thing. In stead of one-sided conveyance of values we now speak rather of clarifying of values. You do this together.

Solving problems together

This is not easy, since we live in a time when we have got the insight that social problems have a global dimension. Wars, scarcity of energy, natural disasters, distribution of resources and the environment are themes that we , the Netherlands, being a small country, can do very little about without the other countries. And then the outcome is already splendid when the theme is put on the agenda of a world conference and when people have agreed to a meeting scheme of five years. There is little progress in that. Let alone that you can do something about these issues as a child or a youngster. Of course it is true that a better environment starts with yourself but there is a great gap between composting apple cores and the hole in the ozone layer due to CO2 emission. This is a major problem in peace education. Our device: first and foremost, appeal to the living environment of children. Naturally, children encounter great problems there. But we have to keep the perspective in mind. We see this as a major task of educators. They are considered to have an overview and realize hope for a world where people can live together in peace.

Problems in the living environment of children

In the Fort of Remembrance De Bilt we make the link between World War II and the living environment of children. That is not simple because it involves a period that is hard to picture for the children. The key to this link is the scapegoat phenomenon, which is of all times and all places. Anywhere in any group of people you have scapegoats. People or groups of people who get the blame of things they are innocent of. In the Second World War they were the Jews and gypsies, the people who had other political convictions and also homosexuals. Moreover, you can see it now in society when people who seek asylum get the blame for lack of housing. We must not immediately start to think of Germany. Hundreds of racist incidents, some with a fatal ending, take place every year in the Netherlands too. Well, the big scapegoat issue can also be found in small groups. At the office, in school, in families, and in the streets. Nearly 400.000 children and young people experience bullying as a terrible nuisance. Many educational projects are targeted on getting rid of bullying. These projects also give the children the idea that you can ban bullying altogether. That is greatly exaggerated. Like you can ban people. We have chosen a different approach, namely by analyzing together with the children which roles are involved. Virtually all children have experienced at one time that they were bullies, bystanders, or scapegoats in different situations.

Creating perspectives

We mentioned three groups. This is the distinction made in psychology. However, we add a further fourth group; the children who offer resistance. Mostly they are to be found among the bystanders, also called the followers. The perspective lies in looking at ways of resistance, together with the children. Not that bullying will disappear forever, but that there are children who dare to resist. It goes without saying that this doesn’t mean that children should beat each other up. Resisting can start quite small for example by letting the scapegoat know that you know about the bullying. Or by looking for other children in the group of followers who also disapprove of bullying. Others talk with their parents or grandparents or a confidant at school. It is very instructive for the children to talk about forms of resistance at times that the bullying is not so much an issue in the group. Processing experiences will have a preventive impact. In this way I see the link with the Second World War. At the time, people also offered resistance; against the abolishment of democracy and abolishment of freedom of speech. Resistance during World War II is something completely different than resistance against bullying, but the principles are the same. For instance, children learn here that Green Peace and Amnesty International can also be called resistance organizations.

The role of teacher

The teacher’s role is a vital one as an intermediate by providing the children with new information and by confronting them with new experiences. It appears form research, however, that a large part of the teachers, approximately 25% of them, leave the bullying be on a regular basis and look the other way. Sometimes this has to do with the fact that teachers use popular children who bully for maintaining order in the group. Most of the time, they do not do this intentionally. Sometimes the reason for it being that the teacher has been bullied himself/herself formerly or presently. There is a lot of bullying in schools. That is why prevention is very important. We work with students of various colleges. We know groups where there is room for one’s own experiences with bullying. It is questionable whether these experiences turn out to be an advantage or a disadvantage when these students come across bullying or child abuse. In this way you learn to trust yourself and others. Then again, trust is actually the core of our work with children. Trust in you, the other and the future.

Peace education and young children

Social problems are not dealt with, in the light of the level of development of the children. The lower department is the foundation of the school. This period is rightly seen as a very important one, especially as far as social skills and emotional development are concerned. Peace education is captured within these terms for the greater part. One teacher once said to me:” I’m doing these things already, so I am occupied in peace education yet.” For a great part she has right but it is recommended to integrate elements of peace education in the school program. We have different materials for young children that contains themes that are important to them. Being different, feel secure, safe and welcome, about loving your self, standing up for someone else, fear and trust. We learn a lot from teachers of primary schools. They are an important source and inspiration for our work. All our materials and products are made in consultation with them.

Children’s opinions on peace education

Children have no particular opinion on peace education. For children a project or lesson is nice when it is challenging and also when it deals with experiences of their own. That they are taken seriously. We notice that at in our exhibitions. Many teachers are surprised at the fact that the children work concentratedly in pairs for almost an hour and a half. Children do not have a clear opinion about peace education. About peace they do. Most children have a romantic idea about peace. Like most adults, by the way. Peace has a bit of a dull image. It is peaceful, there is never any trouble, and there are a lot of white doves. That is one side of the story. The other side is that children attribute negative connotation to peace. Peace means the absense of war, no hunger, no discrimination, no violation of human rights, no torture, no racism, no violence in the streets.

Positive approach

It is a good exercise to put it the other way around. For, you can also say: there is sufficient food for everyone, people respect each other and the human rights, and people appreciate each other because every single one of them is different and unique. That is much more positive. We can achieve this in our own environment. What is more, we are doing it. Much more than we think. Children solve conflicts very effectively, dozens of times a day. Our attention keeps drawn to the conflict too often. This makes things to get out of hand. We can learn from that, but it makes more sense to look at the times that it turns out right. For, everyone knows that talking is better than fighting. Even if it does not always turn out that way. The most important perspective is that you can learn peace. Most of the time by trial and error.

Utrecht, March 2002